TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You've Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet
Although it is the least well-known of those agreements, it is the
broadest in terms of membership. As far as we know, it presently
includes twenty countries plus Europe (but notably excluding the major
emerging world economies of the BRICS bloc), who, with disdainful levity, have adopted the mantle
“the Really Good Friends of Services”. Like its sister agreements, TISA
will enact global rules that impact the Internet, bypassing the
transparency and accountability of national parliaments. The only
difference is that its focus is on services, not goods.
In our previous analysis,
we focused our attention on two points from the leaked text. The first
was a provision that would prohibit democratically-elected parliaments
from enacting limits on the "free flow of information" to protect the
privacy of their citizens—limits that, we argued, should be debated
publicly, not behind closed doors. The second was text on net
neutrality, that would lock in a particular set of global rules on net
neutrality, including an open-ended exception for “reasonable network
management” that could become a loophole for exploitation. Those
provisions remain in the new leaked draft.
But the latest leak has revealed more. The agreement would also
prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates.
Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved
out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market
software”, whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a
country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source
code.
